When to be concerned about return of grades (or lack of)

It greatly depends on the assignment, for example, length and complexity. I give my students a time frame within which to expect grades. Most faculty end up grading papers on their own time, after hours.

I believe an instructor should have grades back by no later than one week after an assignment is turned in. When possible, I get them back the next class. I've taught for 10 years and it can be a pain in the neck to me to do it this way, but I remember how students fret over the situation. I've taught 5 week clinicals and in those, I get assignments back during the next clinical, without exception. Any longer than that and I don't feel I am being an effective instructor as I should be, nor giving them their money's worth.

When I was in nursing school, in my first semester of clinicals, there were weekly assignments. We never got anything back until the very end of the 16 week semester. We couldn't build on anything we'd done, nor get any critiqueing so we would know what we did wrong or right. Being convinced the instructor wasn't reading anything, I completed an assignment at about week 12 and in the middle of it wrote the words "blah blah blah" thinking that would get a response. Nothing. When I got all my careplans and assessments and various other papers back, there were no marks on them, no folds by the staples indicating the pages had been turned, and only checkmarks in the corners. While doing the assignments was good practice, it would have been nice to have feedback. So...I give it...oodles of it, positive and negative, in purple (not red) ink, and quickly!

Wow, that's quite awhile for such a short assignment. I agree with Whispera, for clinical paperwork, it really need to be returned quickly so students can have a chance to improve.

Whispera, that's horrible that your instructor didn't even read your papers! My thought is pretty simple: if there is so much lengthy student paperwork that I really don't have time to grade it in a timely manner, I am assigning too much paperwork! Sounds simplistic, but if you don't want to grade 10 careplans that are 30 -pages in length, don't assign that much paperwork!